Wes Anderson began his career with shorts. Four years before making his feature debut with 1996’s Bottle Rocket, the idea first started as a short starring two then-unknown actors, Owen and Luke Wilson. As Anderson’s career and ambitions have both grown, he’s often returned to shorts and always made them fascinating endeavors, whether in The Darjeeling Limited’s prologue short film, Hotel Chevalier, the Italian film homage of Castello Cavalcanti, and even his brilliant American Express commercial.

This is what makes The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar—the first in a series of four shorts made for Netflix based on Roald Dahl stories—such a perfect project for Anderson. Not only has Anderson proven before that he’s excellent at adapting Dahl, as seen in the 2009 stop-motion animation film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, but his shorts often feel like a place where he can play and experiment, without the same pressure to make a Grand Budapest Hotel or The Royal Tenenbaums-level film—yet he still gives the story at hand the same care and consideration. Even Anderson’s 2021 anthology film, The French Dispatch, showed the director’s penchant for shorts and, given how gargantuan and intricate his films can often become, it’s a welcome change to see Anderson work in a medium that’s a bit scaled-back, but with the same level of aspiration that we’ve come to expect from his films.

Wes Anderson Is Perfect for ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’
Image via Netflix

At least with this first short in this project, it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited to adapt The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Even the structure of this short story feels perfectly Andersonian, as we begin with Roald Dahl himself (played by Ralph Fiennes), telling the story of Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rich, unmarried man in his 40s, who Dahl says is of a type of wealthy men who are “not particularly bad men, but they’re not good men either—they’re simply part of the decoration.” As if that wasn’t enough, Sugar finds and reads a report called “The Man Who Sees Without His Eyes” written by Dr. Z.Z. Chatterjee (Dev Patel), which is about, well, exactly what the title describes. Within this story, the titular man, Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), also describes his own beginnings in how he learned to gain these powers. Anderson often loves to explore this type of Inception-esque way of telling a story, which makes it all the more perfect that this all comes from Dahl’s original tale.

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Throughout this story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story, Anderson plays The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar as if all his characters know they’re in a short, desperate to fit the entire tale into an agreed-upon 38 minutes. Each of these four characters narrate their own story, adding little asides and flying through Dahl’s story, almost like they’re daring Anderson to keep up with them and their rapid-fire recitation. By the end of Henry Sugar, we see how all four of these various narratives have intertwined and interwoven and left a mark on each other. The story itself might be a short, but the initiative within this tale is anything but.

Like in The French Dispatch and Anderson’s other film from this year, Asteroid City, it’s awe-inspiring to watch him throw all of his talents and styles into one story. Here, we get bits of stop-motion, animation, and a sense of humor that allows for smart, fun little camera tricks. For example, late in the film, Cumberbatch’s Henry Sugar tries on a series of disguises, and both Anderson and Cumberbatch never miss a beat in having the actor leave the frame, and return each time with an even more ridiculous costume than the last. Even having a character drive down the street with a fake background Anderson isn’t even trying to hide, or keeping one of the most rowdy scenes in the film off-screen are just some of the fun little touches that make each scene purposeful and deliberately handled.

‘The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar’ Is Like a Perfectly Crafted Play
Image via Netflix

Yet the way Anderson handles The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar also turns him into his own version of Rushmore’s Max Fischer—an ambitious director attempting to tell a grandiose story with an abbreviated time and smaller cast. Anderson treats each scenario like its own play, with remarkably impressive shifting sets, quick changes of makeup and costume, and his own little troupe of players, each of whom plays multiple characters throughout. We’ve always known Anderson is a master craftsman within his stories, but to watch all of this play out as quickly and efficiently as it does is nothing short of brilliant. And while it’s hard to imagine the Anderson of the Rushmore days attempting anything nearly as complex as this, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar still seems like a throwback to a more precise, more restricted story that we haven’t seen from him in quite some time. There’s no time to fill The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar with curious side characters or entertaining asides, and that brevity feels like an interesting experiment for Anderson to make at this point in his career, as the films have grown more expansive and Byzantine.

Henry Sugar also gives us even more actors who are great fits with Anderson’s specific style. Of course, Fiennes works well with Anderson, as we’ve seen in Grand Budapest Hotel, and he’s an excellent choice for Dahl, whose perfectly curated sitting nook feels directly out of a picture book. Cumberbatch is having a ball as Henry Sugar, and his performance works beautifully with Anderson’s tone. It’s also almost hard to believe that Patel and Richard Ayoade have never worked with Anderson before, but hopefully, once this project is done, this won’t be the last time. All of these actors nail the comedic timing necessary to make this short work, and again, this ends up almost like a theatre troupe working their way through what feels like an impeccably crafted play more so than anything Anderson has done thus far.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar feels like a project Anderson needed, a way to explore smaller storytelling in a manner that still allows him room to experiment, have fun, and utilize his very specific voice and talents. Anderson takes what could’ve been a trifle and turns it into a treasure, as even in this more compact story, he still brings an inherent grandeur to everything he touches at this point in his career. We already knew Anderson and Dahl were a perfect match, but The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar shows us that this might just be what Anderson needs right now as a filmmaker.

Rating: B+

The Big Picture

Wes Anderson’s talent for adapting Roald Dahl’s stories is evident in his previous work, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is another perfect project for him. Anderson’s shorts provide him with a space to play and experiment, without the same pressure as his feature films, yet he still gives them the same care and consideration. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar showcases Anderson’s ability to seamlessly blend different storytelling techniques and his talent for creating an intricately crafted story within a short runtime.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is now available to stream on Netflix.